Day 21 - Unpacking and Organizing

Today was kind of uneventful for the most part.  We woke up early and headed to MEGI to help unpack and clean all of the tents and start working on the final report for the expedition.  Let me tell you, I am now a pro at anything involving tents...we had to set all of them up, clean them, then take them down again.  Not to mention it is kind of an art knowing how to fold up all of the parts together and to make sure that it all fits into the bag....

Anyhow, the data entry will probably take some of tomorrow, too...there is a lot of stuff to enter in.  But tomorrow we are all going down to Moka to have a sort of celebration picnic now that the expedition is over! It should be fun plus then we can get to see where our actual research will take place.

There was one part of today that was a pretty big event....I decided that I am going to change my research topic!! Which in turn basically means I have about a day or two to rewrite an entire proposal and make sure it meets certain criteria...it wouldn't be characteristic of me if I didn't like complicating things!  So after talking with Pat, David and a few other people, I decided that doing monkey and duiker censusing again for another two weeks is kind of redundant...not to mention that they told me that not too many primates are even at Moka anymore because of heavy hunting.  Aka, there is a chance that I wouldn't even encounter any on the northern side of the Caldera...which I didn't like the idea of because I want some substantial research and findings to present at the end of the term...so luckily Jake, my TA for the actual FRTE field research course this term, was okay with this as long as I finish it ASAP.  I am VERY thankful since our original proposals were due on December 31st.

However, I don't want to completely kill myself with having to conduct all of this additional research...especially since it is harder to access documents and what not here in Malabo...so I decided to chose something that is still in the Primate order.  Therefore, I am going to census Galagos!! They are bush babies and are a native, nocturnal primate to Africa...they are so cute!! If you haven't ever seen one, you should google them.  I will basically be walking transects of the "road" that goes from Moka to Luba during the night and seeing how many encounters I have and in which habitats they are found...in order to contribute to the relative abundance and habitat use of this species.  There is a lot of habitat destruction that causes this species to not thrive as well as it should be and it is studied a lot less than the monkeys on the island, but it still is a problem for the biodiversity of the island as a whole.

So for the next few days I will be working on writing up that proposal...wish me luck!!  But for now...I have a lot of laundry to get caught up on...and sleep!

Hasta luego,
Lindsey